seagate drives suck these days?

[xrMike]

i also disable power management features on my drives because turning them off and on again makes me twitch. spin all day every day my lovelies!

My god man, think about the environment! Do you realize how much coal has to burn to keep those drives spinning 24-7????? How many frogs must die in the rainforest to satisfy your need for a reliable hard drive???????

[Fizz]

I had a WD BLUE that I bought for someone's laptop and it failed after about 9 months. Failed as in will no longer boot up. I WAS able to cradle out about 100MB of data files they needed though, then I tweaker chucked it... I WOULD try a WD Black but I REALLY do not want to gamble on WD anymore. I have personally had better luck with Seagate, HOWEVER, I will note that someone brought me a computer that was several years old and in doing a upgrade I noticed that they had a WD Black drive and it was still kicking so that put a notch or two on the WD Black. I MIGHT be willing to give them a try but no more Greens and no more Blues. BTW, I just got another Green from them, it was in one of those free agent or book drives and it turned out to be a WD Green and it kept popping on and offline and ended up corrupting about 500mb of customer files so I had to migrate the data out and into a new drive. Done deal with WD if I have to make the choice.

Your experiences are vastly different than mine and I have no way to account for the cause of the differences. My sample sizes that I base my opinions on are in the thousands and pretty much updated on a daily basis.

Failures can be caused by the the way the drives are mounted, power supplies, physical shock, the way it vibrates in the chassis, temperature, handling, use (hard disk thrashing due to not having enough memory is no bueno), defects in manufacture, problems with firmware implementations and many more factors.

So, if the drives you've all had fail were in the same machine, the machine/environment may have caused more of your failures than the drive themselves. Completely speculative. If however you notice a correlation let me know; I DESPISE RMAs and do everything I can to reduce their occurrence (clients love this too - ).

You cite a 2.5 inch laptop Blue. Laptops are subject to a lot more rigors than most desktops. They're engineered for the application, but they also can't account for ever jolt, shift and swing that occurs during normal Laptop usage. Who knows if the laptop manufacturer placed the HDD in a heat pocket that caused it to fail? Did you compare the WD Blue to a segate in the same machine? did it survive similar use/duration? Realize however that even this comparison isn't statistically significant nor should be used to develop opinions on a brand. If anything, model is much more important than make. Was the laptop refurbished (came with a previously used HDD)?

Don't get me wrong, it's not like I don't ever see WD's fail. They do, but I find their DOA and service life stats acceptable in my experience.

In any event; grand scheme I don't particularly care about hard disk failures. If I implement a solution (I work for a small business so I'm just as much an IT consultant as much as I am an OEM solutions provider) I'll account for failure scenarios in the BDR plan. If my client has a business critical/high availability application (well, even if they don't), I'll plan for the drive(s) to fail even if I use premium enterprise drives. If that means cold/hot spares on site, imaging process, Domain Controller with My Docs redirection, standardaized image on site, etc. I'll do that.

ALL drives will fail, its the when that's variable. Account for this and hard disk failures aren't emergency situations, they're standard maintenance. This is absolutely how EVERY individual and business needs to operate. Not everyone is willing to pay for doing things the 'right way' but I make it VERY clear the pitfalls of doing so.

[Kurus214]

It's not a question of if, but when the drive dies.
I tend to buy enterprise class drives and we seem to replace 6-8 per quarter out of ~6,000.
I would be looking at RAID + offline (crashplan) as storage.
If you can go small SSD for the boot / working drive and get your files onto a RAID/NAS and then back them up with Mozey/Crashplan - something like that...

[Kurus214]

It's not a question of if, but when the drive dies.
I tend to buy enterprise class drives and we seem to replace 6-8 per quarter out of ~6,000.
I would be looking at RAID + offline (crashplan) as storage.
If you can go small SSD for the boot / working drive and get your files onto a RAID/NAS and then back them up with Mozey/Crashplan - something like that...

[the86d]

I really only have problems with old Samsungs, and new WD drives these days (well AND people's [came with their notebook] Fujitsu, Hitachi, and WD laptop drives seem to die pretty quick..).

I usually buy Seagate platter drives with a 3-5 year warranty and they all seem to last past the length of the warranty (95%-ish) for home(, home server) and desktop usage, though and usually don't buy retail box, but what I think are correctly called OEM (in a Mylar[?] bag, not box).

[Fizz]

It's not a question of if, but when the drive dies.
I tend to buy enterprise class drives and we seem to replace 6-8 per quarter

QFT!

[Fizz]

I really only have problems with old Samsungs, and new WD drives these days (well AND people's [came with their notebook] Fujitsu, Hitachi, and WD laptop drives seem to die pretty quick..).

I usually buy Seagate platter drives with a 3-5 year warranty and they all seem to last past the length of the warranty (95%-ish) for home(, home server) and desktop usage, though and usually don't buy retail box, but what I think are correctly called OEM (in a Mylar[?] bag, not box).

OEM Drives usually carry a longer warranty than retail, which is counterintuitive but it makes sense once you look at the target market for the products with regard to necessary post sales support.

[the86d]

OEM Drives usually carry a longer warranty than retail, which is counterintuitive but it makes sense once you look at the target market for the products with regard to necessary post sales support.

Years ago when I would try to see if an OEM drive over a year old (that came with a notebook, OEM'd to MFR of notebook) could be warrantied, the drive manufacturer they would state that the warranty was covered by the computer manufacturer if it was over a year, THEN the computer MFR would state that the computer was out of warranty so the drive fell out of that warranty period... HDD MFRS rarely honored the warranty of OEM drives in notebooks.

I stopped trying to RMA drives, when they always just sent you a refurb drive that would last just long enough to finish-up the initial warranty of the orig drive, or if it didn't, you lost data. It wasn't worth it anymore. I'll occasionally RMA a drive for Offline backups, or as an offline "system restore" backup only now...

[Fizz]

Years ago when I would try to see if an OEM drive over a year old (that came with a notebook, OEM'd to MFR of notebook) could be warrantied, the drive manufacturer they would state that the warranty was covered by the computer manufacturer if it was over a year, THEN the computer MFR would state that the computer was out of warranty so the drive fell out of that warranty period...

They rarely honored the warranty of OEM drives in notebooks.

I stopped trying to RMA drives, when they always just sent you a refurb drive that would last just long enough to finish-up the initial warranty of the orig drive, or if it didn't, you lost data. It wasn't worth it anymore. I'll occasionally RMA a drive for Offline backups, or as an offline "system restore" backup only now...

This part depends. LARGE OEM branded hard disks (DELL, HP, etc. use these) and generic, unbranded OEM drives.

I sell OEM drives in my machines. You can claim warranty through me OR direct through the manufacturer, you get the full warranty term of 3-5 years.

So yes, you DO NOT get the warranty terms when you go through a large OEM. Part of the reason for this is the Large OEMs work out better drive rates in exchange for shorter warranty terms, or terms that only extend to the whole machine. They also get lower prices since the MFGs do not have to interface with the end users.

This is one of the key advantages of the small OEMs, the end user keeps full warranties on every component.

Most of my machines have something like this; you don't need me to claim on them either:

- Lifetime memory warranty
- 3-5 year hard disk warranty
- 1-3-5 year Motherboard
- PSU 3-5 years
- Video card (1 year to lifetime)
- Optical drive (well, no one warranties these )

[nothinghere2c]

My god man, think about the environment! Do you realize how much coal has to burn to keep those drives spinning 24-7????? How many frogs must die in the rainforest to satisfy your need for a reliable hard drive???????

lol
im just keeping the polar bears warm

[bg]

All I know is, if it isn't WD Scorpio Black platters or Samsung 830 or
840 SSD's, I don't mess with it. When I do replacements, WD or/
and Samsung.

[Horton Fenty]

I keep buying WD because they last forever, for me anyway. I haven't replaced a hard drive because of failure in a very long time.

[the86d]

The GREEN WD are the worst. Every one of those seem to die in <2 years (seen like 4 deployed, so 4 dead in <2 years).

I have OEM Seagates that are busting 4-5 years of use with ZERO problems, powered-on 24/7 (aside from power-offs to de-rack the case and blow it out 1-2 times a year).
I can't say that about WD drives... and the bearings in WD drives start to whine before a Seagate ever will.

[Fizz]

All of those scenarios were soured by poor BDR planning than bad drives. Had the correct plans and infrastructure been in place the failed drives would have been routine vs an emergency.

It sounds like you deal with a lot of OEM machines and perhaps the majority of them have WD drives. If however large a sample you have is 85% WD it would make perfect sense that WD leads the failures.

I don't use Green drives except in very rare circumstances, so I can't attest to much about those.

We do consumer computer repair too, but not with great emphasis currently. It's maybe about 5-7 machines a day from memory upgrades to disk failures to virus removals, etc. I don't handle a lot of these anymore since I do mostly IT end of things but am still involved in the repair consulting, purchasing, client contact, etc. Aspects. Failures in this setting usually involve machines over 3 years. At that point I don't even consider these failures for statistical purposes.

[sandman21]

Was this drive for a NAS?

WD RED drives are really nice ( I have a drawer with 20 1TB reds right now), but they aren't suitable at all for desktop use. They're meant for NAS units. Essentially the red drives disable the error internal error checking functions most desktop drives have; NAS units take care of this internally and if a hard disk tries to do its thing while the NAS wants to do something else... it may fail out of the array in a due to a detection of a false failure.

There are other optimizations as well, but the jist of it is don't use REDs in a for a desktop.

Really, I'm not kidding with you, DO NOT use a RED for a desktop.

Willing to part with 5 - 1TB or better 5 - 2TB.....